Recently, The Wall Street Journal and South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel reported that the U.S. group ICANN, the organization that regulates the world’s Internet domain names, is now allowing companies and organizations to create their own version of “.com.” ICANN is saying this innovation is “one of the biggest changes ever” to the online naming system. Now, companies will be able to end their addresses with the name of their company, such as “.coke,” or use their city, such as “.FtLauderdale.”

With the shortage of .com web addresses, the change can produce hundreds of millions of dollars in business for companies whose business is managing the Internet’s vast registries, as well as those selling the names. Companies could also gain new tools for highlighting their identities and networking with suppliers and distributors.

Industry associates are worried that creating new suffixes could cause confusion to consumers. But not to worry because according to the articles, you will have to shell out $185,000 in order to obtain a personal suffix.  Additionally ICANN has the final decision on all the new domains and applicants must prove they have the technical capability necessary to keep a domain running. This will help reduce the amount of new domains created.

Speculators say the new system will not diminish the value of existing Web addresses. After all, Web names that were created by ICANN in 2000 never really caught on.

A recent article in the Greater Miami Attorney at Law Magazine shares ways on how to get potential clients to find you on the Internet. A senior writer from FindLaw, a website that provides free legal information, shares ways on how to get potential clients to find you on the Internet and have them contact you. It is very important for these potential clients to feel a connection and at ease when looking at your web page. 

When advertising on the Internet it is very important to know the audience you are trying to reach. It is very common that you would want to write a website as you would for a judge or another lawyer, but most of the time that is not who you are trying to reach out to. The people most likely looking at your page, and to hire you, would be the people who were just injured in a car accident, arrested for a DUI, or harmed by a doctor’s mistake. You have to consider the questions the readers are looking to be answered and if your website provides that type of information, or at least enough to make them contact you.

It is also important to use plain language when creating your website. Potential clients want to be able to understand what they are reading, not confused by legal jargon. By using plain language that is easy to digest by potential clients, it gives them confidence in your abilities to help them with their problem.  Another benefit to using plain language is that when potential clients are searching for a lawyer that is what they plug into search engines. A search engine marketing consultant is invaluable in researching the words most used in your practice area and in your geographic area.

When creating the layout to your website, make sure the information is divided into easy-to-find segments. You know from your own experience that when information is not readily available and easy to find, you hit the back button and move on to the next site. Use headers, subheads, bullets, and bold type that will assure potential clients that you have what they are looking for.

For more tips on how to write and structure your website visit http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/after-deadline/.

There are over 126 million blogs on the internet according to a Miami Herald article. So the question is how do you make your business blog stand out? Tasha Cunningham, web entrepreneur and PR expert, suggests the following tips to help boost your ranking in the search engines.

Tip #1: “Be Free” – Creating free blogs through Wordpress or Blogger will increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines.

Tip #2: “Good words are key,” – Instead of using your companies name all over the blog, pick a keyword related to your business and center your blog around that word.

Tip #3: “Think like an editor,” – After you have found your key word, do not over use it. It is recommended to use it in every other post.

Tip #4: “Inform,” – Make sure that when you post you are informing your readers about your business, not just using the blog to post advertisements.

Tip #5: “Educate,”- In your blog posts, teach your readers something they didn’t already know. You can also post instructional videos.

Tip #6: “Persuade,” – In each post, end with something that persuades the reader to try something or view something else. For example add a link at the bottom of the post relating to what you just wrote about.

Tip #7:  “Compliment your competitors,” – It is recommended to comment on the blogs of your competitors. Do things like talk about how well an article was written and then post a link to an article you wrote on the same topic.

For more blog marketing tips visit www.BizBytes101.com

In the May issue of Website Magazine, Linc Wonham updated readers on the recent disruption of “shady” SEO tactics in his article titled, “Grow Profits From the Farmer Update.”  According to the article, nearly 12 percent of all Google searches in the U.S. were affected by this change. Google is encouraging all online businesses to reassess its own content because of the change, especially merchants. 

Many e-commerce sites have seen their rankings slip since the change, without knowing they were practicing shady SEO tactics. Now the goal is that merchants’ content will be original, and this will help online consumers easily find the business and products they are searching for on Google. 

To ensure your rankings go up, start by auditing the content. It’s important to review all existing content from recent to past blog posts and clean up or remove anything that has errors, copied from another site or both.Then check the links. Linking your business to poor content will hurt your rankings.

Finally, produce great content. In Google’s eyes quality, originality, authoritativeness, presentation and value make for great content. Make sure you avoid misspellings, factual errors and outdated information. Don’t copy what users can find somewhere else. Lend expertise, make it easy to consume and that it’s visually pleasing and engaging for users.

 It’s interesting to see a traditional business magazine like Inc. grasp the importance of optimizing your website via a sound search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.  According to Inc.’s recent article, ”Even companies that do big business online struggle to be noticed by Google users….Traffic is directly related to your site’s rank among Google’s searh results.”

It’s important to understand how the search engines decide their rankings. Each website should consider important factors, begining with the strength of keyword usage and the organization and functionality of the website. 

The Inc. SEO guide is a great read and checklist for those considering a proactive internet marketing program for their business. For more tips, read Inc. full article here.

We are all aware of the power and popularity of YouTube, which is now the Internet’s second most popular search engine behind Google.

With its 18 million daily US visitors, it is fast becoming a great outlet for Florida advertisers, hobbyists, social media users and PR pros.  Some use it for simple how-to videos while others promote viral campaigns to attract, educate, entertain and hopefully make some new relationships.

The following Fast Company article provides us with the back story on how former Google executive and current YouTube chief executive Salar Kamangar helped mold the concept and the company into an important part of Google’s current and future growth plans.

Click here to view article:

How YouTube’s Global Platform Is Redefining the Entertainment Business

For public relations and marketing professionals, former South Florida social media expert Adam Singer is a pioneer for several reasons.

First, he’s a very bright social media strategist keen to show how social media and business marketing converge. He’s also one of those pioneers who’s OK with people re-purposing his content. With that in mind, today, we’re publishing one of Adam’s posts on why companies need to integrate social media into their public relations.

Adam recently was in Las Vegas for MarTech at the LeadingRe Annual Conference; he spoke on two other panels. Among the speakers were Guy Kawasaki and Scott Murphy.

Adam sets the stage: “…The MarTech opening session title is ‘Architecting a Social Web Marketing & P.R. Strategy.’ For this presentation, I’ve decided to dial down most of my content from the deck so that event-goers focus on my words instead of reading slides.  However, to supplement my session and provide the same content to The Future Buzz community, here’s a brief written summary of what I’m presenting.” (more…)

In that place where public relations and search engine marketing converge, practitioners have a long-standing understanding of the process: Infuse every press release, opinion and op-ed, advertisement, passage on the website, and other written text with keywords.

Keywords are the words and short phrases that not only define what your firm or client does, but what prospective clients or customers likely will be using in their searches.

For marketing communications pros from South Florida to New York City, the process is the same. Every document we write or Website we create for our clients is stacked with keywords, including those seen on the screen – and unseen in the back-end where only programmers go.

But has the process changed? A provocative new perspective has emerged from none other than the SEO Team at Google.

Metatags are a waste of time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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